‘papo & yo’ Posts

Hello everybody! We’ve been hard at work since we first unveiled Papo & Yo last summer, and the game has come a long way in the past few months. As we get ready to (finally!) show off more of the game next week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, I wanted to take the opportunity to tell you all a little bit about how Monster – a character very important to both the story and to me personally – has evolved since my initial concept into the Monster you see today.

If you’ve been following Papo & Yo, you may remember that Monster represents my father, a man I had a difficult relationship with. To tell the story I wanted to tell – my story – I knew that this character had to show the positive aspects of the man I loved… and the negative aspects of the man I feared. This turned out to be challenging – I knew who Monster was, but not what he looked like. Luckily, I’m extremely fortunate to have friends like Nilo Rodis, a man who has worked on the art for movies ranging from Pixar titles to Star Wars, and the man who helped me find my father in Monster.

We continually strive to make PlayStation Network the most innovative console game and entertainment service and that’s why we’re thrilled to announce a three-year, $20 million dollar investment plan to develop PSN exclusive games. Our line of PSN exclusives has had great success with titles such as Joe Danger, Critter Crunch, Flower and the PixelJunk series, and we’re excited to add new and different game experiences to this portfolio of games that can’t be found on any other game console. This investment includes support across both our own network of first-party studios as well as for the Pub Fund, which was first introduced at GDC in 2009.

Puzzle-platformers are no rare breed on PSN, but one upcoming title, Papo & Yo, is looking to revitalize the genre in a number of intriguing ways. Introduced in early June on the PlayStation.Blog, Papo & Yo tells the story of Quico, a young boy who has an unlikely best friend: a giant hulking beast named, appropriately, Monster. Together, the duo must navigate an ethereal world that’s reminiscent of a South American town but is set entirely in Quico’s imagination. The world itself is made up of dream-like neighborhoods to roam and populated with puzzles to solve.

After getting my hands on the game at E3, it didn’t take long to notice the unique approach developer Minority is taking when it comes to navigation and puzzle solving.

E3’s hyperkinetic pace will test the endurance of even the most dedicated PlayStation fan — new game trailers are bound to slip unnoticed through the chaos. To make things easy, we’ve compiled 10 11 of the biggest and brightest trailers E3 2011 had to offer. Which one is your favorite?

Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time

Sly Cooper’s first PS3 outing isn’t due until 2012, but you can get a head start with this richly illustrated debut trailer. Check back later this week for our E3 demo from our E3 livestreaming session — it’ll be your first peek at gameplay.

Hello everyone! I’m the Creative Director at Minority, a small independent team of game creators based in Montreal. It’s my great pleasure to today reveal our first title, Papo & Yo, which we are bringing to the PlayStation Network next year thanks to the support of SCEA’s Pub Fund.

I have always wanted to tell the story of my childhood, as the difficulties I lived through shaped the man I’ve come to be. But telling my story was a major endeavor for me as an artist. First I had to master videogame design so I could realize my vision; after that, I had to find an appropriate method to tell a difficult story in an engaging way. And finally, I needed to find a group of people who would believe in me and take the risk to dedicate themselves to a project like this.